Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

Former major league baseball player and steroids whistleblower Jose Canseco believes that Global Warming could have saved the Titanic.

“Titanic 100 years wOw. Global warming couldve saved titanic. Sad to say,” came from the former slugger’s Twitter account this past Sunday – marking the 100th anniversary of the maritime disaster that claimed over 1500 lives.

Mr. Canseco is entitled to his opinion. His Twitter followers decided they wanted to know his thoughts by reading his tweets. But is his commentary via social media newsworthy?

Current legacy media lifeline?

With all due respect to the former Oakland Athletics slugger: you are not an authority on iceberg melting nor history and haven’t been much of a celebrity for at least a decade. An appearance on “The Apprentice” with other has-been’s doesn’t make you a current pop culture icon. So once again I ask the question, “Why are his tweets newsworthy?”

Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune have published an entire piece on Canseco’s Titanic tweet. The reporter included that Canseco got “defensive” when some of his followers challenged his theory and how the anniversary “hit home” for him as he was reminded of his days owning two yachts and his baseball bat he named “Titanic.”

“I had a bat I named Titanic. It was biggest rawlings ever made and beautiful and unbreakable don’t know where Titanic is now,” Canseco tweeted.

What is most intriguing from journalism perspective are the headlines this piece is currently sharing. Most notably the Tribune is proudly reporting that columnist Mary Schmich has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in the same edition. A well-deserved honor for a great journalist writing for one of the most respected publications in the world.

Now if we can just try to not follow up Ms. Schmich’s great work with stories about Pauly Shore’s views on preventing the Hindenburg disaster, we can say we’re moving foward.

Want more likes or clicks for less? The new Facebook timeline for pages seems to actually work in your favor — for now.

I have to disclose that this information is not from months of testing, but it is from a total of $4,415 spent so it should still be fairly representative.

I tested three different destination tabs for our ads over the two week period: likes, timeline, andexternal url.

CPC for ads with click LIKE and destination tab as likes= $.50
CPC for ads with click LIKE and destination tab as timeline= $.63
CPC for ads with click HERE and external URL = $.71

CPC= Cost Per Click

I found that the ads that delivered a much higher return on investment (ROI) than the rest were the ads that encouraged people to “Click LIKE” but then also took them to our like page if they clicked the ad to show social proof of our engagement levels. (more…)

With the popularization of #FirstWorldProblems, I’ve realized I have less and less to whine about with sincerity.

Going bananas. Punny?

However, if you sat around all day scrolling through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Flickr, and MySpace (just kidding) as I do, you would rack up a hefty list of complaints. The whole world can’t be perfect, but maybe spreading this list, I can make a small contribution to the efficiency of social media. In no particular order:

Auto DMs and Mentions – It’s great to thank people for following you, but if you’re going to do it, do it. Don’t let a computer do it for you. Mention something personal you see in their bio so they know you’re a real, live person. People like live people.

Keeping the link in your Facebook posts - The Facebook version of leaving the seat up or dishes in the sink. It looks so much cleaner when you let the wonder of Facebook coding supply the attractive picture and excerpt and delete your link. Just wait for the custom box show up and then delete, delete, delete. Of course, if you want the Hootsuite URL and you have to schedule a post, you’ll have to leave the link in there. However, please, if you can, erase the links!

No engagement – You may find your local government agency is on Twitter and celebrate with a Tiger sky-lawnmower-pull. YES! Transparency! Alas, you later find that it’s just an RSS feed and no human being filters through the mentions, no matter how many times you try to bug them about why your car got towed in a non-street cleaning area… Engage with your followers. This is the point of social media.

Pinterest drives traffic. Hard. Go look at this and then come back. Even more interesting, it’s the first online media driven by women first. (Facebook was driven by students. Twitter and Google Plus geeky men.)

Where Twitter has become insular and media-centric (and still is important) and Facebook has become the gossip center (there will always be one), Pinterest promises to be the beautiful, visual, smart-search engine that everyone wants.

Twitter is every airport, casino, and high school football game you’ve ever visited.

When Sarah stands in line for a breakfast sandwich in the Atlanta airport, she overhears the couple in front of her discussing a recent Florida cruise. When Kevin sits at the black jack tables, he cajoles with the table buddies — perfect strangers, yet short-term friends — and chats with the dealer. At Amy’s son’s football game, she gets the scoop from other parents about how the athletic director is handling the program and what can be done about it.

Picture this when someone says they tweet

We live our lives in constant communication with others, as we have for thousands of years. The beginning of history and the written word have brought us to Twitter. It’s time to realize that the social media giant didn’t change our communication practices that much.

Political and journalism circles were a-flutter Monday morning when Ben Smith, longtime blogging pundit for Politico, broke the news that Ben Smith would be joining BuzzFeed as editor-in-chief.

Smith is seen by many as part of the young political journalism establishment and his move to a site that offers up stories such as “Dogs Sticking Their Head Out of Car Windows” shocked many media watchers. The obligatory jokes about the level of depth on BuzzFeed began in earnest with Reuters social media editor Anthony de Rosa tweeting an imaginary pitch: “Mr. President, Ben from @BuzzFeed, what are your top ten Honey Badger mashups?”

The digs don’t concern BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, who’s seen a healthy growth in traffic to his site over the past year. Peretti thinks there’s room for both LolCats and longform, in-depth journalism on his site. We spoke on the phone this morning to discuss how hiring Smith should be seen as a logical step in his site’s expansion and how social sharing may save journalism.

News distribution, Peretti says, has moved past a reliance on Google search to a reliance on sharing. “The media you share is becoming a key part of who you are,” he said, and that means that quality journalism is becoming increasingly important. People will anonymously click on a trashy gossip story, but they want to share “something that’s hilarious or smart or touching. … People are going to share things that they’re proud of, that have an emotional resonance to them. That is good for reporters.”

Though Peretti won’t comment on BuzzFeed’s relationship to Huffington Post, it’s not hard to see this emphasis on sharing as setting the site up as a newer version of Huffington Post — a site Peretti helped co-found. What Huffington Post showed the journalism establishment about search, Peretti seems to want to show about people’s sharing habits. It’s part of why he hired Smith, who he sees as “an amazing combination of old school swashbuckling reporter and Twitter and social media fanatic.” Continue reading.

With more than 400 million active users, Facebook celebrated its sixth birthday in February. And while sites like NYTimes.com and CNN.com experienced a decline in the number of unique visitors last year, Twitter‘s total increased by almost 300 percent. The future of journalism is uncertain, but clearly social networking is booming.

Social media’s prominence has led many news organizations to hire social media editors, full-time staff members–sometimes several full-time staff members–completely dedicated to the rapidly growing phenomenon.

Many of us turn to social media to get the latest updates from our friends, reconnect with those we have lost touch with, or be entertained during a slow work day. But for many reporters, social media is now serving a vital function by being media sources when researching stories.

According to a national survey of journalists, conducted by Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, 89% said they utilize blogs for research purposes, 65% use social media sites like Facebook, and 52% use microblogging sites like Twitter. In addition, 61% of reporters use online encyclopedias, mainly Wikipedia. But is this new trend in journalism a dangerous development for fact checking or just a new use for the popular social media?

While sites like Twitter and Facebook provide a forum for millions to voice their grievances and rant about whatever is on their mind, numerous blogs and social media feeds have become trusted sources of information from organization like Watchdog.org, Huffington Post, The Daily Caller, and many others. These types of organizations that have a fact checking system already in place make their social media feeds a smarter choice to pick from. However, the reporters surveyed know that solely relying on social media as a source is not a reliable way to produce stories. According to the survey, 84% said social media sources were “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media, while 49% say social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards.”

Another interesting aspect of this survey is what type of journalist uses social media and blogs more often for research. The survey concluded that journalists who spend most of their career writing for websites reported using social media the most often (69%) while magazine writers only turned to the online and social media only 48%.

So why does this study matter and how will social media influence journalism in the future? The simple answer is that this study shows that reporters using social media as a crutch to do their jobs. Reporters are looking to the various social media platforms as a necessary tool to be more effective, efficient, and thorough. With this, reporters are going to grab sources and contacts from a variety of walks of life to improve coverage and quality of their stories.

This study also gives websites like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs additional credibility and will increase their staying power and purpose. If Facebook is viewed as more than a purely entertainment escape, additional resources and reluctant subscribers are more likely to join to be a part of the social media movement.

Lastly, this study reiterates the power that online journalism organizations have in a world that is now more accepting of online news ventures. With more and more people getting their news from the internet, this study shows that reporters and news consumers alike are turning to alternative sources to get information.

Although no one knows the next social media website that will dominate the conversation, one thing is sure – social media is only growing in popularity and utility.